


720

by Apocynaceae



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Alzheimer's Disease, Animal abuse implied, Freeform writing, Gen, Not Beta Read, dragon - Freeform, gringotts dragon - Freeform, loose connection to chronology, not exactly prose, or reality, percival graves does not know he is percival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-05-20 06:33:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14889452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Apocynaceae/pseuds/Apocynaceae
Summary: Percival is a dragon guarding the Lestrange vault. He's losing his sight and his hope for escape.





	720

**Author's Note:**

> Not beta read and not written like a regular story. Strange tenses and phrases ahead, beware. At least there are dragons.

Percival did not want them to leave. The kind visitors to his vault, they had arrived with soft touches to his scales and even softer words.

The woman with a figure, as supine and proud as a swan had the last words. “He’ll lose his mind in there,” she said. “Give it a week and he won’t even remember who Percival Graves is.”

The woman’s companion, his eyes wet and blue like heavy rain clouds, seemed sad then.

Right then, a spark ignited in his belly and clawed its way up to his throat. Breath held fast by anchoring lines across his rib cage, he let out a huff of air between his muzzled jaw. Vowing then to remember who Percival Graves was.

Soon they left and took with them warmth and white light. In their absence his vision began to fade, and the only lingering thought in his head was a name, Percival Graves.

Afterwards, once the chains crushing his wings were slackened, he had stopped expecting their return. Dejected, and tired from clawing up a concrete pillar- he laid down. In front of his snout the number 720 became emblazoned at the edges as goblins returned with lamps and despair in hand.

Despite being driven to exhaustion and his movements choked by chain links- his thoughts remained free.

So, Percival whispered the question in blue-edged smoke trails, “Who is Percival Graves?”

And when the Clankers came again, hushed footsteps on his marble orchestra. They brought dim lamplight and their shark eyes to his iron laced altar. He roared before their molten swords, “Who is Percival Graves?”

And all too often, when his only companions were the toothy scrapes of his bonda and the rats chewing at his black ash talons, he would whisper, “Where is Percival Graves?”

Alone, slowly rusting away in darkness, only his voice would answer him, as hoarse and dim as the fire smoldering in his belly.

Percival wasn’t sure when, it could have been mere hours, or a century. Time to him like that of a loyal dog waiting at the door for their owner. But eventually freedom came for him.

They were a trio. Three voices separated by body but inseparable in their hearts and minds, shared by those past events which like silver thread sewn them together. To him, they were Cerberus, his guide dog out of hell. They took their treasure from his vault and then took the chains off his body.

Withered, Percival struggled to fly at first. But, when he did his body moved in perpetual motion. He was unable to stop, like a car spinning out of control. Inertia was his new master, and the trio clinging to his back respected this, so they let go of his steel spines in the gray sunset.

Now he flew, unable to pause. His wings carried him over a bigger world of marble and concrete. By all measures, still a cage to Percival. Inside it, he listened as he passed over. All the while he wondered if he could catch a glimpse of a memory in the voices. One of Percival Graves, the man he was supposed to forget. But, there was no word of him. Only quiet musings of botched first meetings and heart ache.

Soon, he flew over sharp-edged forests. Dragging, his belly scraped against the tall pines of the Black Mountains. Winter flurries stuck to his wings and dragged him down further. Here just above the world there was a quiet lull. The kind that only the fallout from a blizzard could create. Comforted by it, his wings grew tired and he fell.

A silent comet burning out. He crashed into the trees, bending pines that snapped like shotgun reports, but never broke.

Percival stayed long after the snow melted, and new plants took root. He remained stationary and the trees rooted through the veins of his wing, and gnarled wooden knees wound themselves around his body. Where his scales touched the grass there formed an inseparable point, between beast and earth, and the two wove themselves together.

So, there he stayed. The robins sang to him from their low perches, but he did not answer. Percival listened. Carried by the mountain air were the musings again. Magnified by the hollers below and carried by the tree branches they came to him loud and clear, and became his own.

A dragon must have his hoard, and so Percival had his. Every voice was his. Every voice a memory. Every memory was in his head. Yet, none were of Percival Graves.

So, he continued to listen and collect, and the robins sang by the edge of his forest. Their warning was clear, a dragon’s hoard was near.

No human disturbed Percival as he slept on in the woods and collected voices. That is until one did. He was a man who heard the robin’s warning, and followed them, like directions on a map, until he reached the dragon at its center.

He stepped carefully, his knees weak as dried oak from old age, but still able to carry him down into Percival’s hollow. The trees’ roots had tied the dragon down, caged him in, and demanded no movement of Percival. He looked barely alive, a faded crystalline version of himself. His scales as dewy as fresh sap and his body still, as if along with food, he no longer needed air.

Percival woke up slowly. He felt an absence in the air. As if there was a hole punctured in the great canvas sack of his mind, and the memories quieted, consumed and sucked away by a lacking. A lacking in the form of a man with the same heavy blue eyes that had left him, but these eyes weren't sad and they did not look directly at Percival’s own faded ones.

“What happened to your head?” asked Percival. His voice raspy, it barely spewed ash, his lips crumbled like old embers in their attempt to form words.

The man sat by him now. He still gazed up at the honeycomb structure of the roots rather than meet Percival’s cloudy eye. Above both, amber sap stalactites dared to drip down – and through the sap the summer sun cast a chandelier of light on both dragon and his uninvited guest. Finally, they both made eye contact in the broken golden light. Percival’s eye shed its milky film, the sun, as it did every afternoon, re-introduced itself to the pupil of a cave dweller.

“You could say I lost it- or rather am losing it.” The man spoke softly, but not from age, as if he knew the wind would carry his words to Percival. He finally let go of his cedar walking stick and it rolled into Percival’s petrified wing. One hand in his rucksack he began rummaging around and took out a notebook.

Percival interrupted his search, “Why have you come?”

“I heard,” said the man, looking at the notebook, his curls in his face. “That you hoard memories.”

Percival watched him close the notebook, any image or word inside still too blurry to make out. Then the man placed a jar on the ground. Inside the contents had become tinted green.

“I would like to ask for some of my own. In return I’ve brought you-“He paused and looked at the label. “Liver- and well, I am not sure why, but I think as an Iron Belly you should like them.”

Percival’s interest peaked he had not been given real food since he crashed.

Now, when he looked at the man, his hair a faded sandy blonde and temples stark white, he noticed a change. Even before the livers were offered to him in a shriveled, freckled hand, he saw the color leaking back into the stranger.

The man’s hair- his cheeks- his eyes- became opaque and his wrinkles began to burn off in the sun. The robins’ cries became the whistles of artillery fire in the air. The liver tasted hearty- as earthy as the mud-stained snow now pooling around Percival's feet. His joints came loose from the roots, and the tall pines shattered into splinters. He stood, high above the world now, the man looking up at him.

The same eyes, but a different background.

“You’re alright- you’re alright. You lucky duck!” The man said his hands up cautiously. He wore a smile still visible to Percival, despite his head being tilted away. The man’s movements quickened pace, as if miraculously well-oiled he was now a quick and fluid machine. “My name’s Newt – I’m not going to hurt you.” He tugged off his Ushanka to better reveal his whole profile.

Percival felt snow on his wings- he shuffled them, but only snorted as a response.

“You were crashed out here by yourself. Thankfully, behind our trench line.” Newt hooked a rein to his harness. “You don’t mind if I take you back to our stockyard. You can join the others, and perhaps eat some liver.”

Percival tossed his head and snow rained down onto Newt. The dragon arched his back, pointing his chin down towards the man. Percival looked at him, the man looked cold, his nose terribly red with no hearth in his heart to warm him. The ice crystals in Newt’s hair as threatening as crystallized sap. To Percival it was his hoard, something to sit on, and shield during a winter storm.

“I’ll keep you warm,” said Percival. His breath left his nostrils like hot steam from a kettle and was stolen by the winter wind.

There was no response from Newt to his words, his eyes wrinkled at the corners. To Newt it was an affirmative, and he lead Percival slowly back towards their line.  

On a shattered tree stump a robin sat and whistled a tune to the retreating pair. And beyond the robin, running up a grassy knoll cobbled by purple clovers, was a lanky boy with thunderclouds in his eyes. He was waving his arms and shouting Newt’s name. A cheery smile on his face, despite the blasted snow banks ahead of him and the radium tracers above him, tracking mortars like falling stars through a split sky.


End file.
